THE LAST MAGAZINE– Sophie Cookson is a maverick, a jack-of-all-trades, and, in Gypsy, a girl with no back story. Debuting on Netflix tomorrow, the show finds Cookson playing Sydney, an enigmatic barista who is seemingly haunted by her past, unfriendly and disengaged from the superficial actions of her day-to-day life. We are given just a glimpse of her existence in the first episode as she interacts with Diane, a psychologist in New York around whom the show centers.

A shockingly subtle psychological thriller, Gypsy sets Cookson up as the love interest of Naomi Watts, whose married Diane delves dangerously into the personal lives of her patients, including Sydney’s ex-boyfriend, played by Karl Glusman. From their first encounter, there is a palpable fixation between the two characters, a blatant tension. Sydney appears driven and in control, while Diane is nervous—startled even by her own growing interest.

The role is, Cookson notes, transformative, different, and, in some ways, more challenging than most of those she’s had before, a character who appears to be powered by sensuality and manipulation. “I really had to get into her head, discover her drive, her emotion,” she notes, “even down to the music she likes.”

That process of gradual discovery mirrors somewhat our own introduction to Sydney. In the first few episodes, we know so little about her. She’s a barista at a coffee shop-by-day-bar-by-night venue on a seemingly typical New York City street. She’s not unfriendly, but certainly not chatty. She’d be the dark-spirited cool girl, if cool hadn’t become a cliché. Sydney wants you to wonder who she is and what’s behind her eyeliner-rimmed eyes and dark clothes, but she’s not going to tell you when you ask. “She is hardened by something,” Cookson explains. “While she’s driven and highly sexual, she’s also very fragile.” This balance is where the actress thrives, mastering a subtle yet powerful emotion vividly alive within her character, holding onto her words and remaining convinced of their truth. “I didn’t want her to appear evil or unlikeable,” she continues. “In fact, she’s the opposite—she’s intriguing, exciting even.”

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Sophie and the cast of ‘Gypsy’ were in New York City on June 29 and they stopped by the AOL BUILD Speaker Series to promote their new project. The gallery has been updated with several pictures from that day, with a big thanks to my friends at Marvelous Margot for the help.

INTERVIEW – Who are you when no one is watching? This is the question asked over and over by Netflix’s steamy new thriller, Gypsy, which follows Jean [Naomi Watts], a disaffected New York therapist, as she engages in increasingly erratic behavior. Among the riskier of Jean’s transgressions is her relationship with Sidney [Sophie Cookson], a havoc-wreaking siren determined to become a rock star.

For British actor Sophie Cookson, the duplicity of Gypsy’s characters posed new challenges. “I needed to sit down and work out what the truth was in what Sidney was saying and what she was projecting,” she tells us. And yet Cookson is old hat at playing mysterious, self-directed characters. Her first film out of the Oxford School of Drama was Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman, where she played a tweed-wearing, gun-toting secret agent alongside Colin Firth and Samuel L. Jackson. It’s a role she will reprise in the second installment of the Kingsman franchise, out later this year.

Ahead of Gypsy’s release tomorrow, Cookson spoke to Interview from London about sex scenes with Naomi Watts, pretending to live in Bushwick, and her fascination with fear.

ELOISE BLONDIAU: How did you approach the challenge of playing such a complicated character in Sidney?
SOPHIE COOKSON: It’s really interesting. You first meet Sidney through her ex-boyfriend who’s in therapy. [Through him] you kind of get a sense of how nostalgic you can be for someone who’s just broken up with you. She’s a very enigmatic person. There’s no background on her. That was interesting for me—having to create that base, that story for myself. She’s definitely got a lot of layers, and for me it was about working out what she wants the world to see of her and what she actually is. I think she wants to come across as a super confident, really in-control person. But actually, she’s kind of a swan—gliding along but paddling fairly quickly underneath.

BLONDIAU: We see mostly see Sidney through the eyes of people who are obsessed with her. How did you dig underneath those perceptions?
COOKSON: Knowing so little about her, I focused on what made her tick. She’s passionate about music as an aspiring singer in a band, and she’s completely obsessed with Stevie Nicks—she names her dog after Stevie. So listening to a lot of Velvet Underground, Fleetwood Mac, that was pretty important. Also, in the script she’s always described in a feline way, so I tried channeling that tiger/lion aspect.

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Sophie was interviewed for Wonderland magazine, featuring a gorgeous new photoshoot! She talks mostly about ‘Gypsy’, working with Naomi Watts and much more. Make sure to check the high quality pictures in our gallery and to read the article below!

WONDERLAND – Securing her first major role in Matthew Vaughn’s explosive Kingsman: The Secret Service, Sophie Cookson’s arrival saw her burst straight out of drama school and onto the screens of film fans worldwide; a rapid rise beyond her own comprehension, the part put her alongside the likes of acting heavyweights Colin Firth and Samuel L. Jackson and she’s soon to star in the film’s second rising – Kingsman: The Golden Circle lands this September.

Undeniably a male-heavy cast, before her next foray into the world of undercover espionage, she will star alongside Naomi Watts in new psychological thriller Gypsy, a Netflix project written, directed and starring a predominantly female task-force.

The series sees Cookson take on the role of Sidney, a mysterious character and the focus of obsession for Watts’s Jean Holloway, a psychotic therapist who develops dangerous and intimate relationships with the people in her patients lives. Ahead of the show’s release, we sat down with with Cookson to find out more.

Do you want to start by telling what attracted you to the Gypsy role?
I mean it’s very rare that a script like this comes your way, and I think when you’re not working you hope that there’s a script somewhere out there that can speak to you, that you can click with, that you instantly want to be part of. As soon as I picked up Gypsy it was that script. Sidney is the same age as me, and it’s the first time I’ve ever played anyone my own age, and she’s just going through that thing which I think is quite typical of a 26 year-old, that kind of quarter life crisis; when you’re changing and really becoming the person you’ll be.

And how did you prepare for the role?
Sidney’s main passion and drive in life is music. She’s completely obsessed, Stevie Nicks is her icon; she’s even named her dog Stevie. So for me it was really getting a kind of feel for the music she likes. You know very little about her, there’s no real background story, so for me it was working out the kind of person she is, her interests: Fleetwood Mac were on repeat along with The Velvet Underground, which is a pretty good research topic.

She sings in the first episode, was that actually you singing live?
That was us in a studio before. We did some live takes as well which were so scary, I mean, I’ve always sung, but singing in front of a crowd of people, in that kind of setting is very empowering but terrifying at the same time, especially in the short shorts that Sidney has to wear!

Have you ever had to do anything like that before?
I used to do musical theatre when I was younger, but I think that’s such a different thing. It felt much more exposing, especially if you’re coming in it like, “This is Sidney’s song that Sidney has written”, it becomes a very personal thing. But it’s incredibly liberating once you get into it.

A priest, jailed for the murder of a nun thought to be possessed, after she dies during the exorcism. A journalist delves into the story to try to determine what really happened and if the priest killed a mentally ill nun or lost the battle with a demonic entity.

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